Sleep-Dependent Directional Interactions of the Central Nervous System-Cardiorespiratory Network

We investigated the nature of interactions between the central nervous system (CNS) and the cardiorespiratory system during sleep.

Overnight polysomnography recordings were obtained from 33 healthy individuals. The relative spectral powers of five frequency bands, three ECG morphological features and respiratory rate were obtained from six EEG channels, ECG, and oronasal airflow, respectively. The synchronous feature series were interpolated to 1 Hz to retain the high time-resolution required to detect rapid physiological variations. CNS-cardiorespiratory interaction networks were built for each EEG channel and a directionality analysis was conducted using multivariate transfer entropy. Finally, the difference in interaction between Deep, Light, and REM sleep (DS, LS, and REM) was studied.

Bidirectional interactions existed in central-cardiorespiratory networks, and the dominant direction was from the cardiorespiratory system to the brain during all sleep stages. Sleep stages had evident influence on these interactions, with the strength of information transfer from heart rate and respiration rate to the brain gradually increasing with the sequence of REM, LS, and DS. Furthermore, the occipital lobe appeared to receive the most input from the cardiorespiratory system during LS. Finally, different ECG morphological features were found to be involved with various central-cardiac and cardiac-respiratory interactions.

These findings reveal detailed information regarding CNS-cardiorespiratory interactions during sleep and provide new insights into understanding of sleep control mechanisms.

Our approach may facilitate the investigation of the pathological cardiorespiratory complications of sleep disorders.